It will be a scene reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl's classic
documentary, Triumph of the Will: A high,
breathtaking
panorama of the masses, a rippling ocean of people, millions
packed
into Havana's Plaza de la Revolución roaring waves of
adulation. And there he will be, poised high on the
parapet
bordering the massive marble statue of José Martí, the
very spot from which Fidel Castro once gave his interminable
orations. From a distance, he is a Nixonian figure --
the same
receding hairline, square jaw, swarthy jowls, brush brows
over dark,
darting eyes. But he is not the passé politician, he
is
the new El Libertador from Miami. He smiles smugly,
raises his
arms and acknowledges the thunder of acclamation. The
crowd's
howling increases, reaching a crescendo of happy hysteria in
a frenzied
chant:

Now, see, that's what gets Jorge Mas Canosa so upset.
That is
misinformation. It is the kind of misinformation that
most likely
is generated by Fidel Castro himself. How many times
now has
Jorge Mas Canosa said he does not want to be the next leader
of
Cuba? Hundreds...well, maybe dozens...of times.
Counting,
that is, from after the time he said he wouldn't mind being
the next
leader of Cuba. Which was before he said he would not
rule it out
if the people wanted him. At any rate, that is
misinformation and
Jorge Mas Canosa knew I would do it to him. He never
trusted me.

"It's not that I don't trust you," he told me one day after
I had again
cornered him, this time as he worked his way through a
backslapping
crowd of compatriots in Miami's Omni Hotel ballroom, all
congratulating
him for his inspirational oration at the Cuban Independence
Day
luncheon. I had cornered him at a number of public
functions over
a two week period and, although each time he turned away my
request to
spend some time with him, we had gotten friendly on a
superficial level.

"How are you, my friend!" he said this time, shaking my hand
vigorously when I was pushed into him.

"I need to spend some time with you," I said, blocking his
way.
"I need to capture the essence of your character and the
passion of
your mission in life."

He paused and looked up at me for a moment, as if deciding
whether he would trust me.

"It is not that I don't trust you," Jorge Mas said, "but you
are a
journalist. I know what you will do. You will go
to your
computer and you will pull up your Nexus and you will get
all the
misinformation that has been printed about me in the
past. Then
you will go talk with some of my enemies and they will give
you
additional misinformation. Then you will write your
story and it
will add to the misinformation that is out there about me."

I try to make the obvious point, that I will not know what
he considers misinformation unless I talk with him.

No, he shakes his head, clearly thinking: This gringo
no entiende what the hell I'm trying to tell him.

"Well, O.K.," he says. "Here's what you can do.
You go out
there and gather all the misinformation that is out there
about me and
write your story. Then you can bring it to me and
we'll see."

He turns and permits himself to be engulfed by the
crowd. Later,
he never returns my telephone calls when I try to tell him
that I have
gone out there and gathered three full boxes of
misinformation. I
want to ask him now why so much of it checks out.

*

A brief quiz to provide a perspective:

Name the one man who has had, over the last three decades,
the most
influence in shaping the United States government's foreign
policy
toward Latin America.

Right, you win the cigarro gigante! Por
supuesto, es
Fidel. Ever since he came to power 33 years ago, the
U.S.
government's perception of the Castro threat has governed
this
country's views and actions in both Central and South
America.
From the Bay of Pigs to Chile to Granada to Panama, the U.S.
has spent
hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of lives
attempting to
block what it defined as Castro's attempts to export
Communism.

Part two of the quiz:

Name the one man who has, over the last two decades, most
influenced
the U.S. government's perception of Castro and, in fact, has
systematically injected steroidal doses of paranoia into
that
perception.

Chances are, unless you live in Miami, are among
Washington's policy
insiders or have a job that regularly puts your eyeball to
the key hole
at the White House, you haven't a clue. Few Americans
have ever
heard of Jorge Mas Canosa. Yet if it were up to
him -- and
his wealthy circle of Cuban-American exiles with whom the
Reagan and
Bush administrations have had a symbiotic relationship --
Mas would be
Cuba's next Numero Uno Hombre.

HoooorrrrHey!

Jorge Mas, at 53, is now the most politically significant
Cuban in the
United States. He is viewed by key government
officials as the
leader of 1.2 million Cubans in exile in the United
States. His
influence is unmatched in both the congressional and
executive branches
of the U.S. government. He is a founder and the
chairman of the
Cuban American National Foundation, a tax-exempt
"educational"
association with more than a hundred wealthy directors and
trustees who
annually pay "dues" of anywhere from $5000 to $50,000 each.
(A few
contribute more.) Mas also controls the Foundation's
lobbying
arm, the Cuban American Foundation, as well as its PAC, the
Free Cuba
Committee. Together they are the single most effective
legislative leveraging force in Washington. Says
former Senate
Foreign Affairs staffer Barry Sklar: "The Israeli
lobby could
take lessons from CANF." That's ironic because the
Cuban exile
lobby was originally modeled on the Israeli design.

Recently, the name of Jorge Mas Canosa has begun to pop up
outside the
Washington- Miami loop. Within the last several
months, largely
as a result of the publicity Mas has generated in pushing
for a tighter
economic embargo of Cuba -- and then getting into a very
public battle
with The Miami Herald about it -- articles have appeared
about him in a
few major newspapers and at least one news magazine.
Network
television is weighing in with a segment about Mas on 60
Minutes this
fall. Jorge Mas claims he has not been happy with all
of the
coverage. A large part of it, he says, is
misinformation.
That is why he says he stopped cooperating with the media.

But Jorge Mas knows better. Although he complains
about the
critical comments and the misinformation, Mas knows he has
coopted the
media. With sophisticated information control and
personal
persuasive abilities, he has maneuvered the media into
fostering the
myth he cultivates: That he is simply an example of
what his
friend George Bush calls "the Cuban miracle in
America." He is a
golden chip in the grand mosaic of exile success stories, a
poor
immigrant who starts as a dishwasher, works his ass off as a
milkman
and shoe salesman, gets a few breaks and, thanks to the
blessing of the
free enterprise system, becomes a multimillionaire
contractor.

Only with Mas the myth goes further: He takes his deep
Cuban
patriotism, his passionate resolve to bring democracy and
freedom to
his homeland, and meshes them into the good old American way
of doing
politics -- with money and the power of his Cuban-American
constituency. The criticism -- the misinformation --
has focused
on his overzealousness, his political and financial
machinations, his
affinity for using money muscle to bend the system to his
will.
Still, the myth provides a shadow which helps obscure
him:
Sure, Mas carries clout in Washington and knows the
congressional
pressure points better than most Beltway insiders, but he's
only a
single-issue Miami Cuban. He may play in the Big
Leagues, but
he's no threat to the game as long as he remains in the
right-field
bullpen.

But the myth does not explain the true roots and reach of
Jorge Mas'
power. It does not explain what enables him to consort
with world
leaders and make foreign policy deals as if he were an
autonomous
subsidiary of the U.S. State Department. It does not
explain his
ability to manipulate U.S. government agencies, to
circumvent
bureaucratic regulations, to have standing administrative
policies
modified to his benefit. It does not reveal what
induces both the
present and the previous President of the United States to
immediately
react to his beckonings and why George Bush, especially,
handles Mas
with singular sensitivity, demonstrably willing to do
embarrassing
public flips on issues of importance to Mas.

The myth is a mask. It does not place Mas in the
proper
historical context. It does not reveal the records
beneath the
résumé, the tracks of his covert associations and his
role in the web of clandestine schemes entwined in United
States policy
in Latin America for the last three decades. The myth
does not
explain why so many are so fearful of Jorge Mas
Canosa. The myth
does not account for those special bonds from which his
power and
influence now radiate. The myth is the misinformation.

*

Compared with, say, Millie, Jorge Mas hasn't gotten much
national
recognition considering how close he has been to the
epicenter of
political power in America. But somewhere in The Miami
Herald's
photo files there's a beautiful shot that illustrates
something about
his relationships at the highest levels. It was taken
a few years
ago when ex-President Ronald Reagan snapped from a nap and
answered a
call from Mas to attend a major Foundation-sponsored rally
at Miami's
Orange Bowl. Reagan, waiving his hefty ex-
Presidential
appearance fee, arrived in his white guayabera and set the
crowd of
20,000 Cuban exiles aglow with passionate rhetoric. ("Test
yourself in
a vote!" the Ol' Gipper shouted directly at Fidel, pressing
his combat
fatigues just 250 miles away in Havana. "Let the
voices of the
people be heard!") The exiles cheered wildly and shook
their "We
Love You, Ron!" signs. Then, later, Mas reminded the
crowd of
Ronald Reagan's long fight against Communism's evil empire
and, as a
token of his appreciation, handed Reagan a pair of silk
boxing shorts
with the lovingly embroidered inscription: "Reagan
World
Champ." The ex- President smiled proudly and held his
new shorts
high as photographers snapped away. Jorge Mas, the man
who
brought about that historic moment, beamed. He knew
that it was a
picture -- Ronald Reagan waving his shorts in a gesture of
unity with
the Cuban exiles -- that would make Fidel very upset,
perhaps even
drive him to an irrational act. That alone was worth
the price of
the shorts.

*

It will take a few flashbacks -- History in the Making! --
to
comprehend the nature of Jorge Mas' power in Washington and
what
appears to be his extraordinary proficiency at exploiting
it:

It's 1981: ....Jorge Mas jumps on an early flight to
Washington
shortly after receiving his first bright idea as chairman of
the newly
formed Cuban American National Foundation. Mas
declares that the
Cuban exiles need their own private radio station, funded by
the U.S.
government, to break Fidel Castro's "information
monopoly." He is
given little chance of success. First, because there
is no
"information monopoly" in Cuba. Cubans regularly
listen to Miami
radio, including its many stridently anti-Castro Spanish
language
stations. Second, because the Voice of America is
doing an
effective job of providing Cubans with objective news
reports about
what is happening both in and outside of Cuba and other
Communist
countries. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut
emerges from a
meeting of the Foreign Relations Committee and says:
"No matter
how thin you slice it, Radio Marti is still baloney.
This hearing
alone is lionizing Castro, making him larger than
life. We are
playing right into his hands."
.....Mas
is also facing opposition from the State Department's U.S.
Interest Section in Havana. Section Chief Wayne Smith
claims that
Radio Marti would be an unnecessary provocation that might
force Castro
to cancel the recent immigration accord. Under that,
Castro has
agreed to release 3000 political prisoners and allow the
orderly
emigration of 20,000 Cubans to the United States
annually. "Radio
Marti should be rejected on its own merits," says Smith.
.....Two
years later: At the Miami headquarters of the Cuban
American National Foundation corks are popping from bottles
of Moet
& Chandon champagne as Jorge Mas and his wealthy
associates
celebrate the passage of the Radio Marti legislation.
In
Havana, Wayne Smith has resigned his post and Castro
has canceled
the immigration accord. Senator Paula Hawkins, the
Florida
Republican from Disney World, staunch loyalist of the Reagan
administration and Mas' chief ball carrier on the Marti
bill,
telephones her congratulations to Foundation members.
In the
House, Florida Democrat Dante Fascell, long considered a
liberal but
closely aligned with Jorge Mas since his district turned
Cuban and Mas'
PAC began handing him big money, gives Mas complete credit
for Radio
Marti. Says Mas modestly: "Ronald Reagan was the
star. But we deserve an Oscar for the best supporting
role."
.....Radio
Marti, placed under the U.S. Information Agency as a
political compromise, winds up as an independent operation
with its own
budget. Jorge Mas is named chairman of its advisory
board.
Over the years it grows to a bureaucracy that consumes as
much as $18
million in U.S. taxpayer dollars annually.

*

It's 1984: ....Jorge Mas is vacationing in Key
West. It is
a beautiful Sunday morning but Mas cannot enjoy the sunshine
or the
verdant tropical splendor because he is thinking of Castro
and the
40,000 troops he has sent to Africa to fight with the
Marxian
government in Angola. Suddenly, he springs from the
chaise,
blinks against the sun's brightness and declares he has an
idea:
Why not repeal the Clark Amendment! That is the 1976
law that
prohibits the U.S. from funding Angola insurgents. He
hops into
his bullet-proof Mercedes and tells Irma, his wife, that he
is going
back to Miami to "see a man." On the way, he
stops by to
pick up his Foundation buddy, Tony Costa, owner of a $15
million
wholesale plant business. They knock on the door of a
Miami
high-rise and an old man with a hearing aid and thick
glasses answers
the door. "We need your help to repeal the Clark
Amendment," says
Mas. The old man points to a plastic world on his desk
and says
in his deep Southern drawl, "Show me where Angola is and
'splain me
what it's all about." And so Congressman Claude
Pepper, another
Democratic liberal who received big contributions from Mas
and his PAC,
becomes a sponsor of the bill that repeals the Clark
Amendment.
President Reagan immediately authorizes $30 million in
covert funds to
be sent to Angola rebel leader Jonas Savimbi. In
gratitude,
Savimbi sends Mas a full-sized replica of an AK-47 carved
out of ivory.

*

It's 1982: ....President Reagan declares that what
this country
ought to do is give away money to private organizations
promoting
democracy abroad. A year later, Jorge Mas suggests the
idea to
his favorite Democrat in Congress, Dante Fascell, now the
powerful
chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Fascell
introduces a bill creating the National Endowment for
Democracy.
Fascell successfully guides the controversial N.E.D. bill
through a
field of heavy fire and becomes the first chairman of its
board of
directors. The law creating the Endowment specifically
prohibits
the use of any portion of the Federal grant for "lobbying or
propaganda
which is directed at influencing public policy decisions of
the
Government of the United States." One of the
first grants
of the National Endowment for Democracy goes to the Cuban
American
National Foundation. In 1988, John Nichols, a
professor at Penn
State, studies N.E.D. documents and discovers that the
Foundation has
received a total of $390,000 in Federal funds from the
Endowment.
He also discovers that the amount is almost identical to the
amount
that Jorge Mas's Free Cuba PAC has reported in contributions
and
distributed to politicians helping the Foundation push
anti-Castro
legislation. What goes around comes around: In
1991, the
National Endowment for Democracy gave a record $462,132 to
seven
anti-Cuba projects, a 257 percent increase over its 1990
funding.
It brings the total to over $1 million of taxpayers' money
funneled
through the N.E.D. for projects or persons connected with
the Cuban
American National Foundation. The N.E.D.'s president
is Carl
Gershman, former aide to Jeane Kirkpatrick when she was U.S.
ambassador
to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick, who has been a
keynote
speaker at Cuban American National Foundation functions, is
a friend
and onetime business associate of Jorge Mas.

*

It's 1987: ....Jorge Mas explodes with yet another
sensational
idea: If the U.S. government can pick up the hefty tab
for Radio
Marti, why not a TV Marti! President-elect Bush gives
him White
House backing. There are some technical problems, this
the most
serious: While Radio Marti operates on an AM frequency
assigned
by international agreement, TV Marti would illegally
infringe on Cuba's
telecasting sovereignty. A powerful group of American
broadcasting executives oppose the idea for fear that Castro
could
retaliate by jamming stations all over the Midwest.
Mas pulls a
fast one. He gets his close friend, Florida Senator
(now
Governor) Lawton Chiles to introduce legislation to create
TV Marti and
then, with an assist from President Bush's White House
strategists,
secures a 90-day "trial" appropriation of $7.5 million
without either
the House Foreign Affairs or the Senate Foreign Relations
committees
holding hearings on the plan. There are a few glitches
during the
trial period: Tethered over the Florida Keys, TV
Marti's
million-dollar transmission relay balloon, dubbed Fat
Albert, breaks
away and gets lost in the Everglades. When Fat Albert
is found
and re-tethered, Castro immediately jams every telecast TV
Marti
attempts. The U.S. Public Interests Section in Havana
reports it
cannot find anyone in Cuba who has seen TV Marti.
President Bush
declares the trial period a success. In March of 1990,
TV Marti
begins operating with a $16 million annual budget. By
1992, the
budget request is increased to $18.1 million. It
doesn't matter
to Jorge Mas that TV Marti isn't being seen. "The TV
signal will
be kept on the air," he announces. "Even if Castro
jams the
signal 100 percent, we will still keep the pressure
on."
One side effect: In retaliation, Castro begins jamming
Radio
Marti's AM signal, which he had previously permitted to
broadcast
throughout Cuba. As a result, Radio Marti must resort
to a
short-wave band, in direct competition with the Cuban
American National
Foundation's own short-wave station, La Voz de la Fundación,
which has no USIA restrictions against broadcasting blatant
propaganda,
inciting acts of insurrection and regularly lauding Jorge
Mas as the
Numero Uno fighter for Cuba's freedom.

*

Last January....Three members of an exile guerilla group
called
"Commandos L," organized by Tony Cuesta and once financially
supported
by Mas, attempt to infiltrate Cuba and are captured.
The Miami
Herald pressures the U.S. State Department to clarify its
enforcement
policy of the Neutrality Act prohibiting the use of U.S.
territory to
prepare or promote violence in Cuba. Three officials
re-affirm
the government's commitment to enforcing the act and tell
the Herald
that the State Department has a policy of informing Cuban
officials of
any potential raids against their country. Mas blows
his
top. Who the hell is the U.S. Government to fink to
Castro about
Cuban exile plots? Mas calls the President's son, Jeb
Bush, who
lives in Miami and is in business with several wealthy
directors of the
Cuban American National Foundation. Young Bush goes on
a local
radio interview show and denies his father's administration
has a
policy of cooperating with Cuba. Two days later the
Herald gets a
call direct from Bernard Aronson, the assistant Secretary of
State who
has been an honored guest at Foundation functions.
Aronson tells
the Herald that the officials had "overstated" the State
Department's
policy, that there was no on-going policy of cooperating
with the
Castro regime. One month later, President Bush himself
pens an
op-ed "Opinion" piece for the Herald, the first specifically
written
for one newspaper, reassuring Miami's Cuban exiles that his
administration would never negotiate with Castro's
government.

*

Last June: ....A Federal judge in New York castigates
the Bush
Administration for its "particularly hypocritical" policy of
returning
thousands of Haitian refugees to "the jaws of political
persecution,
terror, death and uncertainty...." The month before,
hundreds of
Cuban American National Foundation members gathered in Dade
County
Auditorium cheered when Clara del Valle, the Foundation's
Exodus
Program director, announced that 300 Cubans now in Russia
and 150
others in Peru will receive U.S. visas. That brings
the total to
8500 Cubans -- most of whom have not been living in
discomfort or even
without their freedom in a third country -- who have been
admitted to
the U.S. under the Exodus Program. It is a special
arrangement
that Jorge Mas and the Foundation have made with the U.S.
Immigration
and Naturalization Service. It gives Mas his own
immigration
program, and a constant flow of new political
loyalists. The
Foundation is permitted to bring Cubans residing in another
country
into the U.S. as permanent residents, as long as their trip
is
sponsored and two years of health insurance is paid in
advance.
It is the only such arrangement the government agency has
with a
private organization. The government even gives the
Foundation
financial aid for it. Last year, the State Department
awarded a
$1.7 million grant to the Foundation for the Exodus
project.
Although a social program, it is politically
sacrosanct. When
Nancy Wittenberg, director of Florida's refugee assistance
program,
issued a report accusing the Foundation of supplying illegal
health
insurance and "atrocious" services to the Cuban refugees it
brings in,
Jorge Mas and his associates reacted indignantly.
"It's a bunch
of shit," said Foundation director Domingo Moreira.
They then
traveled to Tallahassee to see Wittenberg's boss, Governor
Lawton
Chiles who, when he was a U.S. Senator, received major PAC
support from
Mas. Two days later, Wittenberg issued a letter
regretting her
"error" and apologized to the Foundation for the
"misunderstanding."

*

These days, Jorge Mas is feeling his garbanzos. The
young
immigrant who once scraped leftovers from the dirty dishes
at Miami
Beach's Fontainebleau is romping around the world as
international
emissary for the Let's-Stick-It-To-Castro-Now crusade.
More
importantly, his portfolio carries an Unofficially Approved
U.S.
Government sticker which opens doors. At the first
crack of the
Soviet Union's perestroika, even before Gorbachev stepped
aside, he
hustled off to Moscow to advise the Soviet leader to cut off
military
aid to Cuba. Mas was ready to deal. Said one
report:
"Mas Canosa has told Soviet officials that he can help them
obtain U.S.
aid, but only after they sever their alliance with Cuba."

El tiene chutzpah? Mas had only begun: In
Czechoslovakia,
he got Václav Havel to end Prague's diplomatic service for
Cuba
in exchange for promoting business deals with Mas' wealthy
capitalist
friends in Florida. In Lisbon, he successfully
urged
Portugese chief of state Mario Soares to publicly call Fidel
a
"dinosaur." In Budapest, he got the leader of
Hungary's
Parliament to sign a statement of solidarity with the Cuban
American
Foundation's efforts to overthrow Castro. In Buenas
Aires, he
coaxed Argentine President Carlos Menem to record an
anti-Castro
message for broadcast over the Foundation's radio service to
Cuba.

Although Mas comes off as an ambassador for his own
government-in-exile, the substance of what he accomplishes
on his
foreign rounds is less important than the publicity gushers
of
anti-Castro sentiment generated. Mas' primary
goal is to
constantly rile Fidel.

Among what Mas touts as his more significant
accomplishments, for
instance, is establishing a personal relationship with
Russian leader
Boris Yeltsin. He did it in 1989 when Yeltsin took his
first tour
of the U.S. Mas had the Russian political renegade
invited to the
University of Miami for a seminar and party. He then
buttered him
well. "Gorbachev is a man of the past," declared
Mas.
"Boris Yeltsin is the man of the day, the man of the hour."

Mas' hospitality paid off. Immediately after Yeltsin
survived the
coup attempt which enabled him to consolidate his power in
Russia,
Jorge Mas hustled off to Moscow. Mas soon announced
that the
Cuban American National Foundation was authorized to open an
office
there. The Foundation needed an office in Moscow as
much as it
needed one in Bora Bora, but for Mas it was a propaganda
coup.
And, more important, it had to piss off Fidel.

*

Quién es este hombre magnífico and where the hell did he
come from? The story of Jorge Mas' climb to
international
diplomatic renown mixes facts with his self-polished
myth:
After years of activity in the anti-Castro movement,
including
participation at the Bay of Pigs, Jorge Mas decided in the
late '60s to
take a respite from fighting Fidel, to settle down and make
a better
living for his wife and young sons. With a loan from
an exile
banker buddie, he acquired a construction firm, got a major
contract to
lay cable for Southern Bell and, by the late '70s, was worth
at least
$9 million. (His firm, Church & Tower, is now a
$62 million
business with about 400 employees.) He bought a
sprawling,
Spanish-style mansion south of Miami with high walls,
towering Royal
palms, a tear-drop swimming pool. He drove a Mercedes,
had a box
seat at the Dolphins games, took his family skiing at
Vail. He
had become a very successful capitalist and began to itch
with the
power that came with that success. In Miami, that
power had its
own special twist.

Writer Joan Dideon came to Miami early in the '80s to write
her book
about this "rich and wicked tropical boomtown," this
new
Casablanca, this cool city of hot drugs and pink neon and
Miami Vice
fantasies. Instead she found a deeper, more submerged
reality and
saw as an outsider what those who had ruled Miami for so
long couldn't
see. The Cubans had taken over. By that time,
Jorge Mas was
establishing himself as a new Cuban American force in
Washington --
even though he was still little known among Americans in his
hometown
of Miami. Dideon marveled at a description in a
1983 Herald
Sunday magazine piece about ten prominent local Cubans, one
of whom was
Jorge Mas: "He is an advisor to U.S. Senators, a
confidant of
federal bureaucrats, a lobbyist for anti-Castro U.S.
policies, a near
unknown in Miami. When his political group sponsored a
luncheon
speech in Miami by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger,
almost none
of the American business leaders attending had ever heard of
their
Cuban host."

That's what actually enabled Mas to quickly climb to the
majors: The Cubans had taken over the new Miami
and the old
Miami didn't know it. The Herald was still attributing
power to
the "Non-Group," a tight clique of Old Money Anglo
executives who
headed the city's major financial, cultural and political
establishments -- including The Miami Herald. In
reality, the
power had slipped to a group of wealthy Cuban exiles who had
risen to
success not by assimilation and community contribution but
by loyalty
to one another. It was that priority to personal
loyalty that
Americans found -- and still find -- so difficult to
understand in the
Latin culture. Yet it was Latin loyalty that enabled
Miami's
Cubans to knock out some of the town's biggest corporate
players.
Years later, in discussing the diminishing role of a large
Anglo
construction firm in Miami's development, Mas explained
it: "It
has been very difficult for it to compete with the Cuban
builder who
has 10 acres and a network with other Cuban
contractors. The big
companies couldn't compete with the network I developed with
my fellow
Cubans. I was able to put together a team of my
peers. I
had to. Nobody gives power away."

It is part of the myth -- a valid if ironic part of it --
that Mas
energized his Cuban network of wealthy peers, among whom the
Latin
trait of personal loyalty is far more important than
political
ideology, to build the Cuban American National Foundation
into an
organization that grabbed power in Washington with the most
immoderate
and uncompromising form of political ideology.

*

Jorge Mas is a master at creating images. The image he
created of
himself early on was that of the little guy fighting the
mighty
bureaucracy on behalf of freedom and justice for Cuba.
Congressional staffers called him the "Lone Ranger," he once
told a
reporter, "because I was always walking all those halls by
myself,
trying to sneak into the office of some congressman or
senator."

Mas pictured himself to the media then as a self-appointed,
one-man,
Cuban-liberation lobby. "I'd write letters to 50
congressmen and
senators, telling them when I was coming," he said, "and I'd
always get
six or seven answers telling me to come and see them at
such-and- such
a time." This, Mas said, is how he developed his
contacts.

Oddly enough, no one questioned how he so quickly parlayed
his contacts
to the highest levels of government. By 1983,
President Ronald
Reagan himself responded to Mas' invitation to speak at a
Cuban
Independence Day rally in Miami. Later, Vice President
George
Bush accepted a similar invitation.

Mas claimed his role as a lobbyist had been preceded by a
change in his
philosophy about the best way to fight Fidel Castro.
He had come
to the realization that exile military action and guerilla
warfare had
not worked. "We had to stop commando raids and
concentrate on
influencing public opinion and governments," he said.
La Causa
was alive but now it was not going to be fought in the
swamps of Cuba
by exiles in fatigues, but in the corridors of the Capitol
by wealthy
Cubans in creased business suits. "La batalla de
Washington," Mas called it. "We are playing by
the American
rules of the game."

And that, too, is a part of the myth that holds some
reality. The
American rules of the game required political payoffs.
The Cuban
American National Foundation, both through its members as
private
individuals and through its PAC, began seeding its financial
support in
exactly the right places, including at the top. When
the 1984
Reagan campaign was forced to reject a $5000 contribution
from the new
Cuban exile political group after critics charged that
federal election
rules had been violated, Mas and his wealthy friends then
handed Reagan
$200,000 as individuals. "Some of us got together and
at the
level of simple citizens raised the money," explained Mas.

Money helped, but from the start the Foundation's success
was imprinted
with the steam rolling style of Jorge Mas himself. Mas
is a
master of confrontation. Every individual meeting,
casual or
formal, friendly or not, is a fully attentive
challenge. Speaking
or listening, he fixes an individual with an unwavering
gaze. He
is warm to those who support him, vindictive towards those
who oppose
him. He calls it a Cuban trait. ("We are very loyal
and grateful
people. We never forget our friends and always
remember our
enemies.") He never disguises his ego, never
reveals a
crack in his self-confidence. He's articulate,
has a
sophisticated English vocabulary, but hangs on to an
accent. He's
a diminutive man with pale, delicate hands (he fights a
nail-biting
habit), but on the rostrum he looms large. Like his
nemesis
Castro, Mas is a tireless, extemporaneous speaker. He
jabs the
air with his forefinger, thrusts out his chin on points of
defiance. The veins in his neck bulge with intensity,
beads of
sweat appear on his upper lip. He swivels, bobs and
moves like a
stand-up puncher. An occasional tick of his head and
right
shoulder betrays the edgy nerves of a fighter who has fought
many a
battle, but there's still a focused intensity that conveys
his
unremitting passion for the mission.

*

From the beginning, there was no mistaking where Jorge Mas
and the
Foundation stood on the Cuba issue: Right side of the
hard
line. Shortly after CANF opened its Washington office
with five
full-time staffers in a modern red-brick building
overlooking the
Potomac, it placed a full-page ad in the Washington Post
with this big
headline: "SAY IT ISN'T SO, PRESIDENT REAGAN. NO
DEALS WITH
CASTRO."

Say what? Was Reagan even thinking of dealing with
Castro?

Of course not. But the tact revealed the strategy that
Mas would
use in every move to come, strategy that utilized his
expertise in
sophisticated propaganda ploys. The ad fired the first
shot in
the new Foundation's war against Castro. More, it was
a
reflection of Mas' aggressive, pugnacious approach.
And -- what
only a few insiders knew at the time -- it was an indication
of Mas'
collusive links to the White House.

La battalia de Washington was underway. It didn't take
long for
Washington to lose. Mas and the Foundation pulled off
an
incredible series of legislative victories. Almost all
involved
large amounts of tax-payer dollars poured into programs of
dubious
national interest and none dealing with the country's most
pressing
domestic priorities. Since 1981, more than $160
million has been
funneled into the Foundation's anti-Cuba projects by the
U.S.
Congress. And it wasn't because the threat from Fidel
was
increasing.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis of December, 1962, when
Soviet Premier
Khruschev agreed to remove Cuba's nuclear threat and, in
return,
President Kennedy agreed to end the secret war being waged
by the CIA
and the Cuban exiles against Castro, the island faded as an
American
security concern. But not as a political one. It
remained a
symbol of rebellion against the American capitalistic
system.
Like a feisty miniature chihuahua defiantly yipping at an
enormous,
haughty lion gorging himself on a fat carcass, it was
occasionally
annoying but hardly a threat to the big cat. Yet for
more than a
score of years in Washington, Jorge Mas has devoted himself
to
carefully constructing awesome scenarios of the chihuahua's
potential
danger. And he knows, even now, that damn dog don't
hunt.

*

Although he himself was nurtured in Reagan's Republican
nest, Mas has
grown powerful enough on his own to declare that a
politician's stand
on Cuban issues, not political affiliation, determines
Foundation
support. In a recent Free Cuba PAC report to the
Federal Election
Commission, those receiving contributions included many a
politician
with few Cuban exiles in their districts, but every one is
on a
Congressional committee considering legislation involving
Cuban issues.

There is a unique dynamic involved in all this which Mas has
been
shrewd enough to exploit. It's based on this:
Most members
of the U.S. Congress don't give a damn about Cuban
issues. There
are very few, if any, districts in this country where a
congressman is
going to lose votes because he took a stand against
Castro. So,
as a lobbyist or PAC contributor, it's easy to persuade a
congressman
that it could be in his interest to vote against
Castro. No
downside to it, and the upside could be green.

Mas has also played hard ball. One of his regular
opponents was
Connecticut Republican Senator Lowell Weiker who, besides
opening a
personal dialogue with Castro, would invariably oppose
legislation
backed by the Cuban American National Foundation. When
Democrat
Joe Lieberman ran against Weiker in 1988, he suddenly found
himself the
recipient of support from some wealthy Cuban Americans as
well as Mas'
PAC. Weiker lost.

Despite a denial from Rhode Island's Democratic Senator
Claiborne Pell
that he got totally turned around by pressure from Mas, his
case is
cited in Washington's lobbying circles as classic.
Six-term
Senator Pell had been consistently critical of the Cuban
embargo,
opposed to Radio Marti and repeatedly called for
normalization of
relations with Cuba. Two years after Weiker went down
to defeat
with the help of the Cuban American National Foundation,
Pell was
facing the toughest re-election challenge he had ever
had. At the
time, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
he also
happened to be opposing an amendment pushed by Florida's
Connie Mack
which would have tightened the U.S. economic embargo of
Cuba.
Then, according to a legislative insider, "It was made clear
to Pell
that if he continued his opposition he would be the next
target of the
Cuban American National Foundation's efforts." Pell
was invited
to Miami to sit down with Jorge Mas. Upon his return
to
Washington, Pell announced he was switching his stand on the
amendment. "It was a very ignoble surrender,"
recalls a
former associate of Mas who remembers the tough times Pell
used to give
the Foundation on Cuban issues. No more. Pell
had been told
for whom the bells might toll.

"I now see Mas as a very unique character," says ex-diplomat
Wayne
Smith who, since his retirement, has followed the Cuban
exile's actions
closely. "In a way he's a credit to the American
way. This
guy has assimilated the American political system better
than anyone
else. He really knows how to use it. He knows
who to
intimidate, who to buy and how to make it work in the most
underhanded
ways possible. He's head and shoulders above every
other
politician in terms of being effective. I think he's
also
sinister. I don't think he understands democracy any
more than
Castro does."

*

That's a rap Jorge Mas has heard before. It is
misinformation. No one has ever blamed Jorge Mas
for the
score of bombs that have exploded over the years in Miami in
or under
or around the cars and businesses of individuals who have
disagreed
with the political philosophy of the Cuban American National
Foundation. Mas has been accused of promoting and
arousing other
hotheads to action, but he has never been accused of any
violence
himself. (Except by his brother Ricardo, who once said
that Mas
beat the hell out of him and took his car. Mas had to
pay Ricardo
$245,000 for that. Mas was later ordered to pay
Ricardo another
$1.2 million for another action when he wrote libelous
letters to
Ricardo's potential business clients. But Ricardo was
never
bombed.)

Mas is well aware, however, that a part of his power base in
Washington
rests on the illusion that he represents the intractable
hard-line
anti-Castro attitude of most Cuban exiles. It also
rests on the
image that he is in control of the Cuban exile community, he
is the
strongman, the caudillo. Mas snaps at every
opportunity to
reinforce both the illusion and the image.

The setting is usually Miami, but early this year Mas saw a
chance to
take his muscle show to the Big Apple. It was un éxito
grande! He managed to rally some 15,000 anti-
Castro
demonstrators -- 4000 of whom had come up with Mas from
Miami --
against a rally sponsored by a peace group calling for
opening
relations with Cuba. He intimidated some big show biz
types,
including Harry Belafonte, Ed Asner and Martin Sheen, into
not showing
up to support the peace group. New York City was
forced to pay
700 police officers overtime to keep the peace and
confrontations were
minimal: A few punches were thrown, one guy got
clubbed in the
head. "We oppose violence," Mas shouted to a reporter
as he led
the mass of protesters along West 42nd Street. "But we also
support any
person's right to engage in any action he thinks necessary
to get
freedom."

Except, of course, if that person wants to deal with Castro.

*

Even on a clear day, you won't see New York from the top of
Capitol
Hill, but when Mas produces massive protest demonstrations
like the one
in Manhattan, the message is clear to many a
politician: Don't
mess with Mas.

Says Jorge Mas: "I laugh at the image of Jorge Mas who
crushes every adversary."

It isn't the image of Jorge Mas that his critics fear, it's
the reality
of Mas' powerful political connections. He's been
quick to use
those connections against those who are not faithful to his
cause or
appear a threat to his personal ambitions.

The case of Jerry Scott, a 51-year-old Foreign Service
veteran and
public affairs officer in the U.S. Interest Section in
Havana, is a
dramatic example of what happens to someone who gets on Mas'
shit
list. As the point man for the State Department's
human rights
efforts in Cuba, Scott knew most of the human rights
activists and
dissidents on the island. Mas was delighted with Scott
when he
helped Ricardo Bofill, a former professor of Marxism and a
leading
dissident, get to the United States. Bofill was put on
the
Foundation's payroll. Left behind as one of Cuba's
most outspoken
dissidents was Elizardo Sánchez, who runs the Cuban
Commission
for Human Rights and National Reconciliation. He has
spent more
than eight years in a Castro prison, much of it in solitary
confinement. Yet Sánchez remains a socialist and wants
to
see Washington open a dialogue with Castro. Jorge Mas
despises
him for that and, because Sánchez is one of the most
prominent
dissidents inside Cuba, Mas views him as a possible threat
to future
goals. (Largely because of that, Radio Martí has
virtually
ignored Sánchez.) When Jerry Scott befriended
Sánchez, he earned Mas' animosity.
"....and...we always remember our enemies..."

On May 5th, 1989, a pack of well-armed U.S. Customs agents
rammed
through the door of Ramón Cernuda's luxury apartment
overlooking
Biscayne Bay. No, it was not a drug bust. It was
an art
bust. The agents confiscated 40 paintings by Nicolas
Guillén, a dissident Cuban artist. Cernuda was charged
under the 1963 Trading With the Enemy Act. He could
have been
fined $250,000 and sent to prison for ten years. Named
as
conspiring with Cernuda to smuggle in the illegal art was
Foreign
Service officer Jerry Scott.

Scott had bought the paintings largely as a humanitarian
gesture from
Guillén for about $300. A talented documentary film
artist, Guillén had spent more than six years in prison in
Cuba.
(Once, to footage of Castro climbing a mountain, Guillén had
added a music track of the song "The Fool on the
Hill.") When
Scott met him, Guillén was a broken man, selling the last of
his
furniture to support himself and his 81-year-old
mother. He
couldn't afford canvas, he painted on poster paper with
homemade
pigments and tools.

If Scott was a smuggler, he was a reckless one. He
declared the
paintings to Customs in Miami and informed both the State
Department
and his bosses at the U.S. Information Agency. When
Cernuda got
them, he wrote the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the
Treasury
Department for authorization to exhibit them and enclosed
Jerry Scott's
card to confirm original acquisition.

What made the Federal art bust seemingly bizarre was that
this was the
first time since the trade embargo against Cuba 26 years
prior that the
U.S. government had seized any paintings as contraband,
although such
national auction houses as Sotheby's and Christie's had been
selling
post-embargo Cuban artwork for years.

Of course, to Miami's Cuban exiles, the bust wasn't at all
bizarre. It was business as usual. Jorge Mas'
business. Jerry Scott had earned Mas' wrath, but Ramón
Cernuda was considered an absolute enemy. Not only was
he the
U.S. representative of Sánchez's human rights group, he was
the
leader of a group of young wealthy exiles who urged a softer
line
against Castro and were challenging the Foundation's claim
to speak for
the exile community.

The Cernuda raid had come shortly after President Bush had
appointed
Dexter Lehtinen as U.S. Attorney. It was Lehtinen who
ordered the
art bust. It was Lehtinen who held a press conference
and
heralded the seizure, as one reporter put it, "as if he had
just
apprehended the leader of the Medillín drug cartel."
Lehtinen played the role of Mr. Justice Department simply
doing his job.

But the raid wasn't about justice, it was about politics and
Jorge
Mas. Not only had Lehtinen been supported by Mas when
he was a
state senator, he was married to Ileana Ros- Lehtinen, a Mas
political
loyalist and old friend (their families were neighbors in
Santiago de
Cuba). Ros-Lehtinen was depending on Mas for heavy
support in her
bid for the late Claude Pepper's congressional seat.
After her
husband's art raid on Cernuda, she got it.
In the end, it was such a perverted use of power that even a
Reagan-appointed Republican jurist, Judge Kenneth Ryscamp,
threw the
case out and called the government's actions "arbitrary and
capricious."

It mattered little to Mas, he had made his point. He
went on a
talk show on Radio Mambi, one of the strident anti-Castro
stations, and
admitted that he was indeed responsible for the action
against Cernuda
and Scott. It was his way of telling the world that,
win or lose,
he is still El Numero Uno Hombre.

Occasionally, even Mas gets carried away with the
role. As when
he challenged Miami City Commissioner Joe Corollo to a duel,
preferably
with guns. Corollo had vetoed a $130 million real
estate
development deal in which Mas, former U.N. Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick
and others were involved. Corollo had suggested that
one of the
investors might have done some business with a communist
country.
That was too much for Mas. He immediately took to the
Latin
airwaves and made his challenge. "I am going to prove to the
Cubans
that you are a clown and a coward," said Mas. "Your
bullying in
Miami has ended because you have encountered a man, with a
capital
M. A very big M."

Corollo laughed off the challenge and suggested the duel be
held with
water pistols to cool off Mas. He wasn't laughing when
he lost
his commission seat at the next election to a candidate Mas
backed with
a large sum of money.

*

There is a seeming arrogance that pervades Jorge Mas'
displays of
power. To a degree, that is part of the facade, the
cultivated
myth. Arrogance is an exposed trait, an obvious
characteristic. With Mas it disguises more complex
motivations.
Little of what Mas does stands as an isolated scheme.
He works
from a master plan driven by personal passions and honed by
his
training. Designed to succeed or to fail, every action
must
ultimately contribute to the goals of the larger mission.

His battle with The Miami Herald was so designed. When
Mas fired
the opening shot against the media flagship of the powerful
Knight-Ridder corporate giant, it didn't come, as it
appeared, from a
fit of pique or spontaneous outrage. The outcome
proved that.

Some Miamians – not all of them Mas supporters -- think the
Herald got
what it deserved. In the past, it has gotten
obsequious in
catering to its Cuban exile readers, a posture pressured by
its
declining readership. In fact, it's ironic that when
publisher
David Lawrence Jr. first arrived on the job, he early
devoted an entire
Sunday op-ed column to Jorge Mas. In handling the
piece, Lawrence
was so deferential to Mas the New Times weekly dubbed him
"Doormat
Dave." (Lawrence quoted Mas: "I am a man who easily
falls in love
with an ideal. I am an idealist. When I see an
injustice
being done, I am the first volunteer to step forward."
Added
Lawrence: "This is the Jorge Mas Canosa he believes too few
of us
know.")

What ostensibly led Mas to begin la battala de Herald was
the
newspaper's editorial opposing a congressional bill
tightening the
embargo on Cuba. That bill was floated by Mas himself
and now,
outrageously enough, here was Mas' hometown newspaper trying
to sink
it. It was a direct challenge to Mas' reputation in
Washington.

Mas' initial barrage came over the Spanish-language radio
stations
which have long been his soapboxes. He denounced both
The Miami
Herald and its Spanish-language edition, El Nuevo Herald, as
"tools of
the Fidel Castro regime" and urged its two senior Cuban
American
executives to resign. "El Nuevo Herald manipulates
information
just like Granma [the official state newspaper of Cuba]," he
fumed. The Herald, he said, conducted a "continuous
and
systematic campaign against Cuban Americans, their
institutions,
values, ethics and ideals."

Publisher David Lawrence and Herald President Roberto Suarez
(one of
the executives Mas had asked to resign) issued a measured
joint
statement in reply calling the allegations "sad and painful
and unfair."

From there, the firing and counter-firing escalated.
Lawrence,
congenitally the Mr. Rogers of newspaper publishers, kept
toughening
up, but he was no match for Mas. The Herald devoted a
huge number
of type inches to the battle, many of them to attacks on the
newspaper
written by Mas himself. The Herald was desperately
trying to
establish a civil "dialogue." It was a very
gentlemanly way to
fight and Mas took advantage of it. He wrote cool,
biting but
diplomatic essays detailing his viewpoint, then headed for
the Cuban
exile radio stations to shove it hot and heavy up Lawrence's
rear
end. The clearest indication of who was winning the
battle came
when Lawrence, after filling a half-page column with what he
thought
was a tough, firm stance, topped it with a banner
headline:
'PLEASE MR. MAS, BE FAIR.' It had the sad sound of a
big
newspaper whining.

It got ugly from there. The Cuban American National
Foundation
sent letters to Herald advertisers to "raise awareness" of
the "bias
and half-truths that have appeared" in the newspaper.
The
Herald's sidewalk vending boxes were defaced and smeared
with
excrement. Lawrence received bomb and death
threats. Mas
publicly deplored such threats and said they had probably
been made by
Castro's agents seeking to discredit Cuban exiles. The
backs of
city buses bloomed with large display ads reading, on the
routes
through Latin neighborhoods, "YO NO CREO EN EL HERALD," and
on other
routes, "I DON'T BELIEVE THE MIAMI HERALD." For the
first time in
its 50-year history, the Inter American Press Association
sent a team,
at the Herald's urging, to investigate a press problem in
the United
States. (It found Mas' pro-Castro charges against the
Herald
"ludicrous.")

The battle went on for months until Mas decided he had made
his point
and it was no longer in his benefit to continue. At a
"Community
Unity" luncheon sponsored by the Easter Seal Society, he
announced that
the Herald had become "more objective" in the past weeks and
declared
the Cuban American community's campaign against the
Herald was
over.

*

David Lawrence and The Miami Herald might take pride in not
knuckling
under to the pressure that Mas and his cohorts piled on, but
they took
a hell of an image pounding. One of the most revealing
aspects of
the affair, however, was the criticism and reaction Mas
himself
received from those who had usually found in his corner --
including
the Bush administration. Jeb Bush is still trying to
distance
himself from Mas, at least publicly. His principal business
partner,
Armando Codina, gave up his Foundation directorship.
Even Elliott
Abrams, the former assistant Secretary of State and tough
anti-Castro
cohort of Mas, publicly chastised his old pal in a speech,
saying Mas'
battle against the Herald was wrong and created doubts about
Mas'
"understanding of the role of a free press in America today,
and in
Cuba tomorrow."

Tough talk, but Mas had to know it would coming.
He didn't
give a damn because he knows he now has the Bush
administration by the
huevos. Both Mas' push for tightening the
embargo against
Cuba and his battle with the Herald fit into a larger
picture.
That picture comes in black and white and features only two
figures: Jorge Mas Canosa and Fidel
Castro. When Mas
saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union coming, he knew
that
Castro's regime would be badly, if not fatally shaken.
Mas
decided to intensify his harassment of Castro in order to
provoke a
reaction that might involve the United States. At the
same time,
he moved to enlarge and fortify his image in case -- just in
case -- a
vacuum for it might develop in some island somewhere.
Part of the
motivation in picking a fight with the Herald was to test
the strength
of the power he had long been methodically accumulating.

Few of Mas' moves to consolidate his power have been
subtle. He
has taken an incredible amount of flak for some of them,
shots that
would have knocked down any other public figure. Yet
he seems to
hold a mysterious force that enables him to endure.
His
successful effort to push Radio Martí's Ernesto Betancourt
out
of his way is an example.

Considering the controversy of its birth, Radio Martí
received
relatively little criticism after it began operating.
That was
because of Betancourt. In order to get the station,
Mas had been
forced to promise a few congressional committees that he
wouldn't turn
it into a rabble- rousing voice of Miami's Cuban
exiles. As Radio
Martí's director, Betancourt became his front man to that
promise. But, as it turned out, Betancourt was serious
about
running Martí as an objective, non-confrontational news
operation. Unlike the Miami exile stations, Martí did
not
call Castro the "bloody satrap" or refer to him as "the
hyena of the
Caribbean." Betancourt, now 65, is a veteran
Washingtonian who
helped set up President Kennedy's Alliance for
Progress. A classy
guy, he has always been fiercely independent. He was
one of the
few anti-Castro Cuban exiles who opposed the Bay of Pigs
because he
thought its inevitable failure would help consolidate
Castro's
power. It did.

Mas used Betancourt to give Radio Martí its initial
legitimacy,
but the director got in the way of the station chairman's
evolving
master plan. Mas' insistence on starting TV Martí led
to
Betancourt's departure. Betancourt argued that the
effort itself
would undermine Radio Martí's credibility. Intruding
on
Cuba's television airwaves would be both illegal and
ineffective and
worse, he argued, it could provoke a reaction by Castro
against Radio
Martí which, until then, was reaching Cuba without being
jammed. Betancourt argued himself out of a job.

He did not go quietly, and Mas had to have known that he
wouldn't. One of Betancourt's friends and supporters
is Georgie
Anne Geyer, a nationally syndicated columnist. Mas
could not
accuse Geyer, always supportive of his anti-Castro stance,
of being
among his liberal enemies. Now, however, Geyer saw
Mas' ploy as
"a raw battle for power," his push for TV Martí a move "to
advance Mas' ambitions to be president of a post-Castro
Cuba."
More sinister, she said, was Mas' "final intent...to use
both Radio and
TV Martí as a means of invoking a 'confrontation' between
the
United States and Cuba." She said Mas hoped to provoke
Castro
into more and more jamming so that, eventually, "President
Bush would
have to retaliate."

Geyer thought the matter serious enough to appeal directly
to the
top: "Someone in the White House has got to straighten
this out,"
she wrote. "For we taxpayers are living with -- and
grandly
paying for -- the illusions of glory of deluded men.
We also may
be paying for far-more-dangerous things, such as an all-out
confrontation with Fidel Castro."

Geyer's column is home based in the conservative Washington
Times and
she is known to have the White House's ear. Yet
despite such
vehement opposition from Geyer and other opponents of the
project,
including his own State Department, President Bush
authorized $7.5
million to "test" TV Martí and then, once it was established
hardly anyone in Cuba was receiving it, another $16 million
a year to
keep it going. Geyer may have had President Bush's
ear, but Mas
had him by another part of his anatomy.

*

Miami is a universe of mirrors. Nothing appears in
context, yet
nothing that happens is without context. It is a
universe
manacled to its history, shaped and driven by the men whose
idealistic
passions and sinister intrigues were enmeshed in that
history. It
is a universe where the myth configured by Jorge Mas Canosa
meets
reality.

One evening not that long ago, a select group of members of
the Cuban
American National Foundation gathered in a private room
above the
Mirabella restaurant on Calle Ocho. They had been
invited to hear
a special guest, a retired official of the U.S. Central
Intelligence
Agency, now a "business consultant." The meeting
wasn't
publicized, the media wasn't informed of it. The
retired official
appears in public rarely and reluctantly. His entire
career has
been shrouded in the utmost secrecy, few Americans even know
of his
existence. Yet he has played a key role in pivotal
events in
American history. That he should emerge from the
seclusion of his
estate in Virginia to speak to a small group from the Cuban
American
National Foundation in Miami reveals a bit about the status
of the
organization in certain circles and a lot about Jorge Mas
Canosa's
connections.

Theodore G. Shackley had risen to Deputy Director of
Operations at the
CIA. That is the Agency's clandestine services
division, its
"dirty tricks" department. At strategic posts from
Berlin to Laos
to Vietnam, Shackley has been the point man in the Agency's
secret
wars. Of the select inside players in the CIA's Old
Boy network,
he is among those deepest inside.

What made Shackley's appearance that night in Miami so
significant to
many members of the Foundation was that, although they had
not known
him then, nor even his name, at one time they worked for
him.
Shackley headed the CIA station in Miami known as
JM/WAVE. The
years of the station's operations defined the future of
Miami, the
character of the Cuban exile movement and the track of Jorge
Mas' life.

Following the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy was equally
furious at
both Fidel Castro, for repeatedly rubbing his nose in the
debacle, and
at the CIA, for botching it. Kennedy was determined to
get
even. He sent his brother Robert to take direct charge
of the
Agency and organize a prolonged clandestine guerilla war
against
Castro. Insiders called it "the Kennedy
vendetta." Miami's
JM/WAVE station became the largest CIA operation outside of
Langley. Thousands of Cuban exiles were put on
the Agency's
payroll. Each of the 400 American case officer
employed as many
as ten Cuban "principal agents" who, in turn, controlled as
many as 30
regular agents. Dozens of Cuban exile groups, most of
whose
members thought they were renegade operations regularly
violating the
Neutrality Act, were actually controlled by the CIA.
More than
$100 million a year went into logistics, weapons, boats,
planes, and
secret training camps in the Florida Keys and the
Everglades.
Nightly raids were made into Cuba, destroying or disrupting
railroads,
oil refineries, sugar mills and other facilities.
JM/WAVE's
secret war was so successful it eventually produced the
Cuban Missile
Crisis. That led Kennedy to a personal awakening, a
sudden
realization that he had brought the world to the brink of a
nuclear
holocaust. He made a deal with Khruschev that included
ending the
secret war and closing down the CIA's exile operations.

Kennedy discovered that wars, even secret ones, are easier
to start
than to turn off. The Cuban exiles thought Kennedy was
a
traitor. So did many of their CIA supervisors.
When the
guerilla raids didn't stop on his command, Kennedy ordered
the U.S.
Navy and the Coast Guard to raid and shut the secret
training
camps. That was evidence that Kennedy was a
traitor. Jorge
Mas still says that the man he hates most after Fidel Castro
is
President Kennedy.

After Kennedy's assassination, the Agency and the Cuban
exiles renewed
their military operations against Castro. They weren't
on as
large a scale but they continued until the late Sixties,
when attention
turned to Vietnam. The JM/WAVE station, however, left
a legacy of
alliances between the Cuban exiles and the CIA that would
endure.
These men, after all, had been trained to be sophisticated
warriors,
schooled in weaponry, sabotage, explosives and terrorist
tactics.
Their loyalties and special talents would emerge down
through the years
in other areas of Agency activities, from Vietnam to Chile,
Angola, El
Salvador and Nicaragua. Some became involved in
terrorist
blackmailing, political bombings and narcotics
trafficking.
Others popped up in Watergate and in other congressional
investigations. The alliances also emerged in business
networking, deals between men who had mutual interests and
fidelities. Many became very rich.

*

Sometime in 1981, in Miami, a very good friend of Jorge Mas
got
married. More than 300 of the most wealthy and
prominent Cuban
exiles in America were invited. They came from all
over the
country. Every one of them, when they signed the guest
register,
listed their current address. Except Jorge Mas
Canosa. He
listed his address as "Santiago de Cuba."
It was another puff for the myth that Mas has been keeping
afloat for
so long. Mas may have been born in Cuba and spent his
formative
years there, but he is less a product of the island than he
is of the
American intelligence community.

When Mas was a teenager in Santiago de Cuba, a port city on
the
island's eastern coast, Castro's 26th of July Movement was
operating in
the surrounding Sierra Maestra Mountains. Mas' father,
a
veterinarian, was a major in Fulgencio Batista's army.
Young Mas,
the third of five brothers and one sister, seemed both a
natural leader
and a natural rabble-rouser. Despite being a Roman
Catholic, Mas
had joined the local Masonic Lodge and teamed up with
another young
Mason to broadcast a weekend program on Radio
Santiago. They kept
taking shots at Batista's local chief of police and were
once brought
in for questioning. That's when Papa Mas packed Jorge
off to the
Presbyterian Junior College in Maxton, North Carolina.

A week after Castro's revolution, Mas returned to Cuba and
enrolled in
law school at Oriente University. He was 19. He
plunged
into student politics and, when Castro began prosecuting his
former
26th of July associates, Mas turned to anti-Castro
activism. One
morning, after he had spent the night plastering the town
with posters,
the police came to arrest him. "God came to my
rescue," Mas would
later recall. "I delivered a beautiful piece of
oratory. The guys
around were so impressed they told the captain, 'He is
innocent, let
him go.'" Two weeks later, he fled to Miami.

Mas never returned to school. He immediately got
involved with
the CIA and its plans for a secret invasion. On the
records of
the 2506 Brigade invasion force, he is listed as the squad
leader of
the 1st Rifle Company, 3rd Squad, El Grupo Niño Diaz.
That
group was aboard a ship which was going to land in Mas'
native Oriente
province. The attack was meant to divert Castro's
attention from
the main force at Bahia de Cochina. Commander Niño
Diaz
and his troops circled around off shore a while and quickly
departed
when it was learned that the main landing had failed.
In the main
force, 114 died and 1,180 were taken prisoner. Mas
never got his
feet wet.

In his interviews with reporters over the years, Mas usually
wheels
quickly through those years between the Bay of Pigs and the
formation
of the Cuban American National Foundation in 1981.
Like all 2506
Brigade veterans, he was offered the chance to receive an
officer's
commission in the U.S. Army with promises, he claims, that
there would
be another invasion attempt. Mas portrays his
Army
experience as inconsequential, says he took the offer but
resigned when
he realized the government was deceiving the exiles.
Married with
a couple of kids, he says he returned to Miami to take a
series of
menial jobs -- dishwasher, shoe salesman, milkman -- to
survive.

Actually, Mas' Army training is relevant. The majority
of the
Cuban exiles were sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, or Fort
Jackson, South
Carolina. Mas was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, home
of the
Infantry School, but also a base where men in civilian suits
came and
gave special courses in such specialties as clandestine
communications,
intelligence and propaganda. No invasion was planned,
but, after
Kennedy's assassination, the government resumed its secret
war on a
smaller scale and more secret level. Some of the
exiles trained
at Benning joined a CIA-financed operation led by Manuel
Artime, the
former Agency-picked political officer of 2506
Brigade. For two
years they launched successful raids against Cuba out of
Nicaragua,
where strongman Anastasio Somoza was in business with the
Agency.
Among the exiles trained at Fort Benning were two who would
become Mas'
closest links to the American intelligence community:
Felix
Rodriquez and Luis Posada. They would also become two
of the
CIA's most effective and lethal agents.

Back in Miami after Benning, Mas was selected for a
newly-formed
anti-Castro organization called Representatión Cubana en El
Exilio, known by its acronym, RECE [ray- say].
Ostensibly, RECE
was backed by Bacardi Rum magnate Jose M. Bosch, but files
later
reviewed by congressional investigators reveal it was CIA
supported. An early FBI report lists its leaders as
Jorge Mas and
Ernesto Freyre. Freyre had worked with the
intelligence
community's top legend, William ("Wild Bill") Donovan, in
ransoming the
Bay of Pigs prisoners from Castro. Also working for
RECE was
Erneido Oliva, the Agency-picked second in command at the
Bay of Pigs
and one of its heroes. Oliva would later remember Mas
as "our
propaganda guy." Mas never manned the boats that
attacked Cuba's
coastline or infiltrated the island, but he did more than
handle
propaganda. An FBI memo reveals how he once delivered
$5000 to
Luis Posada, another El Grupo Niño Diaz survivor and, even
then,
on the CIA payroll. The money was to cover expenses in
blowing up
a Cuban ship in Mexico's Vera Cruz harbor.

Jorge Mas might not have reached his current status as
globe-hopping
international diplomat, back-slapping buddy to prominent
politicians
and influential advisor to the President if he had carried
with him a
reputation as an active associate of the most violent of
anti-Castro
terrorists. Now he keeps the myth inflated by
condemning
violence, except if by insurrectionists inside Cuba.
Now he
publicly distances himself from those to whom he has
provided major
support for the most violent of actions. He was, for
instance,
very close to Tony Cuesta, commander of the group called
Commandos
L. Cuesta describes himself as "some kind of cool
fanatic."
He has organized 33 raids against Cuba. Mas helped
plan many of
them, helped raise money, get boats and guns. On one
raid, rather
than surrender, Cuesta attempted to blow up his boat with a
crude hand
grenade. The blast ripped off his left arm and left
him blind but
alive. He spent 12 years in a Castro prison.
Castro
released him as part his detente with President
Carter. When
Cuesta returned to Miami, he immediately began planning more
attacks. In fact, he designed a special craft from
which island
infiltrators could silently depart through a special
compartment built
into the hull. Mas remained one of Cuesta's quiet
backers.
It was Mas' old network of connections which helped him
become a
multimillionaire business success. His anti-Castro
organization,
RECE, was closely linked to the local Miami unit of the
Communication
Workers of America, a telephone employees' union heavy with
Cuban
exiles. Their offices were both in the Bell Arcade in
Little
Havana, conveniently next to the Army-Navy Surplus
outlet. A RECE
director who had headed the union in Cuba knew two Cubans
named
Iglesias and Torres who had set up a company in Puerto Rico
to do
contract work for the telephone company. In 1968, Mas
opened
their Miami office. Business poured in but the cash
flow was
slow. The firm started to sink. Mas offered to
buy out
Iglesias and Torres for $50,000. Mas changed the name
of the firm
to its English equivalent, Church & Tower, and within a
year after
he acquired it, the cash flow suddenly turned around and
Mas, through
the RECE director's contacts, had a million-dollar contract
with
Southern Bell.

*

The priority of Jorge Mas' primary loyalties rarely surfaces
publicly,
but even when it does and he is forced to protect them, he
does not
hesitate to push every power button at his command --
including the one
that rings at the top. That was illustrated when he
was forced to
reveal his connection to Dr. Orlando Bosch. The former
baby
doctor may be the world's best known anti-Castro militant,
which is the
softest way to characterize him. "Bosch," the Boston
Globe once
editorialized, "is in a class with terrorists such as Abu
Nidal."

Orlando Bosch's career is a prime example of how the
apparatus the U.S.
government created to wage its secret war against Castro
produced odd
permutations. A CIA report ties Bosch to more than 90
terrorist
acts -- bombings, kidnapings, assassinations -- both in the
U.S. and
abroad from 1968 to 1980. In the process, many
innocent people
were killed. ("It is part of the hard reality of war," Bosch
admits.)

Two momentous events in Bosch's career provide an uncommon
glimpse into
a covert brotherhood of intelligence-trained exiles who,
despite being
involved in terrorist activities, have been major players in
the U.S.
Government's Latin American policy. Jorge Mas is a
link
connecting important members of that brotherhood.

In the summer of 1976, at a resort in the mountains near
Bonao,
Dominican Republic, 20 men representing the most militant
Cuban exile
groups held a secret meeting. Bosch considered it a
personal
triumph to bring together the fractious exile organizations
into a
coalition called Commando of United Revolutionary
Organizations, or
CORU. Among those attending that first CORU summit
were several
close associates of Jorge Mas, including the brothers
Ignacio and
Guillermo Novo, José Dionisio Suárez and RECE comrade,
Luis Posada, his old friend from his Bay of Pigs aborted
invasion
ship. After his training at Fort Benning, Posada had
gone
directly on the payroll of the CIA.

At the time of the Bonao meeting, Bosch was a Federal
fugitive.
He had been arrested for firing a bazooka at a Polish ship
in Miami
harbor. Paroled in 1972, he skipped the country when a
grand jury
wanted to question him about the assassination of a rival
Cuban exile
leader. By 1976, he was living in Caracas, where
another Cuban
exile, Orlando Garcia, was chief of the secret police, DSIP,
and Luis
Posada had started his own private security agency. Of
the Bonao
meeting, Bosch would later explain: "Everything was
planned
there. I told them that we couldn't just keep bombing
an embassy
here and a police station there. We had to start
taking more
serious actions." In the 10 months after its first
summit, CORU
took credit for more than 50 bombings in Miami, New York,
Venezuela,
Panama, Mexico and Argentina.

CORU was also responsible for two of the decade's most
brazen acts of
violence. One was the September 1976 car bombing of
former
Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier on Embassy Row in
Washington
D.C. The other was the October 1976 mid-air explosion
of a Cubana
Airlines plane out of Barbados that killed all 73 aboard,
including a
score of South Americans and all 24 of the young athletes on
Cuba's
gold-medal fencing team.

Trindad police arrested two Venezuelans, Freddy Lugo and
Hernan
Ricardo, who had flown the Cubana plane on the first leg of
its trip
from Trinidad to Barbados under assumed names.
Ricardo, who
worked for Luis Posada's security agency, admitted that he
and Lugo had
planted two bombs on the plane. He said that Posada
and Bosch
were the masterminds. Ricardo and Lugo were turned
over to the
Venezuelan police and Posada and Bosch were arrested.
When police
raided Posada's office, they discovered a map of Washington
showing
Letelier's daily work route.

Michael Townley, an American who worked for Chile's
intelligence
service, DINA, later confessed to murdering Letelier and
Ronnie
Moffitt, an Institute for Policy Studies associate who was
riding with
him. DINA had systematically been eliminating
opposition to the
government of General Augusto Pinochet. Townley said
he had used
a team of Cuban exiles, to whom Pinochet was a hero, to help
him.
Among those who worked with him, Townley said, were the Novo
brothers,
both CORU members. He said the radio-controlled bomb
was
triggered by José Dionisio Suárez, another CORU member.

The years went by. Townley plea-bargained himself to a
ten-year
sentence and served five. Guillermo Novo was found
guilty of
murder, but his conviction was overturned because the
government had
obtained his confession from a convict it had planted in his
cell. Ignacio Novo's conviction of perjury was also
overturned. José Dionisio Suárez was a fugitive
until two years ago. After his arrest, the Cuban
American
National Foundation helped raise money for his defense, but
he later
pleaded guilty. Just how tight Jorge Mas is to the
CORU
terrorists was indicated recently when, in a move that any
public
relations expert might call indiscreet, he appointed the
Novo brothers
on the Foundation's "Information Commission." The
commission's
job is to generate better public relations.

Posada and Bosch remained in a Venezuelan prison.
There had been
world-wide reaction to the plane bombing but the Venezuelan
government
was in a bind. Posada had been on DSIP's payroll and
DSIP had
provided Bosch safehaven as a U.S. fugitive. Their
trials kept
getting postponed, but both lived well in
comfortably-furnished cells,
with Sony televisions and designer sheets on their
beds. Bosch
never confessed to the airline bombing, but he did a
frequent jail
visitor, Alicia Herrera, a Venezuelan journalist and good
friend of
Freddy Lugo, details of the plot, including
documents. But
having Bosch in jail was considered a political hot potato
and,
besides, Venezuelan president, Carlos Andres Perez, thought
Posada was
the prime instigator of the crime. DSIP chief Orlando
Garcia, who
himself was on the CIA payroll at the time, offered Bosch
$5000 to
escape. Bosch wouldn't go without Posada.
Finally, in
August, 1985, Posada bribed his way out of jail and, with a
twin-engine
Cessna provided by Cuban exile friends from Miami, flew to
El
Salvador. There he got back on the CIA payroll working
with an
old friend, the CIA's Felix Rodriquez, supplying arms to the
Nicaraguan
Contras.

In 1987, after Bosch was in prison for more than 11 years, a
Venezuelan
judge decided there wasn't enough evidence to hold him any
longer.
(Lugo and Ricardo had both been convicted and sentenced to
20
years.) Bosch was returned to the United States and
jailed in the
Federal correctional center in Miami for 14 months for his
parole
violation. Then the Immigration & Naturalization
Service
legally declared him an "undesirable alien" and moved to
deport
him. Only Cuba wanted him, 31 other countries refused
to accept
him. With his record as a confessed terrorist, Bosch
had to
remain in prison.

But in July, 1990, Orlando Bosch drove away from Federal
prison in a
Mercedes Benz. President Bush had ordered the
Immigration Service
to release him and put him under "electronic monitoring" in
his
home. He had done so against the advice of Justice
Department
officials and the FBI. One retired FBI agent was so
incensed he
wrote a letter to Secretary of State George Schultz
describing Bosch as
"Miami's number one terrorist." When Bosch was
released, The New
York Times wrote a scathing editorial concluding: "In
the name of
fighting terrorism, the United States sent the Air Force to
bomb Libya
and the Army to invade Panama. Yet now the Bush
Administration
coddles one of the hemisphere's most notorious
terrorists. And
for what reason? The only one evident is currying
favor in South
Florida."

There was another not so evident reason: Jorge Mas
Canosa.
Mas had pulled out all stops for Bosch. He not only
had his
favorite Florida congressional hacks, Senator Connie Mack
and House Rep
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, as well as Jeb Bush apply political
pressure, Mas
wielded his own special relationship with the
President. That
core of that relationship was obviously compelling enough
for the
President to squander the nation's international prestige
for the sake
of a single exile terrorist.

*

The core grew from the seed: The Cuban American
National
Foundation wasn't planted by the Cuban exiles but by
Americans
connected with the U.S. intelligence establishment.

Soon after Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, he and
his clique of
rock-hard cold warriors decided on a grand strategy of
taking the war
to the enemy -- the spreading Evil Empire of Godless
Communism.
Chief architect of the strategy was CIA director William
Casey, a
veteran of the Agency's clandestine operations. Casey
declared
the Administration's first mission was to stomp out the
sparks of
Leftist revolutions in Central America, but, in order to do
so, the
crusade had to incorporate a two-front war. Casey
detailed the
President's National Security Council to set up a "public
diplomacy"
program. This was the cover for a covert domestic
propaganda
effort to neutralize the post-Vietnam public opposition to
foreign U.S.
military intervention.

It was Richard V. Allen, the President's national security
consultant
(and the same guy who later added to Reagan's "sleeze
factor" by taking
cash and watches from a Japanese journalist), who came up
with the idea
that the Cuban exiles, if they were led to believe that
toppling Castro
was Reagan's top goal, could be organized into an effective
tool to
promote the President's pro-active foreign policy. As
his conduit
to the exiles, Allen used Mario Elgarresta, a security
council aide who
had once been a political consultant in Miami as well as an
executive
with Southern Bell, for which Mas was prime
contractor. It's
obvious now that Jorge Mas Canosa was the pre-ordained
action
connection, but he was little known in the exile community
and, among
those who did know him, he was considered just another
diehard
anti-Castro zealot. He was a little too obvious.
Washington
needed front men of more stature and respectability to give
the
organization immediate status. Allen and Elgarresta
chose Raul
Masvidal and Carlos Salmon. Elgarresta and Masvidal
had gone to
the same Jesuit school in Cuba. Masvidal was a class
act,
president of a bank and one of the most respected men not
only in
Little Havana but, equally, in the community as a
whole. No one
doubted his anti- Castroism, but he was moderate enough to
be accepted
in Miami's Non-Group of community civic leaders and,
although a
Republican, he was a friend of the Kennedy family.
Carlos Salman
was similarly respected, a wealthy realtor who had long been
in
mainstream American politics as a Republican fundraiser.
Masvidal remembers he and Salman going to Washington to meet
Richard
Allen and Mario Elgarresta. "We were told that there
was a chance
of doing something during the Reagan administration for Cuba
if we
could organize to improve our image," he recalls.
"That was the
hype."

It was at that meeting that Elgarresta suggested adding
Jorge Mas
Canosa as a founding organizer. "It made sense at the
time," says
Masvidal. "Carlos was largely involved in political
affairs, I
was largely involved in civic affairs and Jorge had always
been
involved in the Cuba cause. So that's how we got
together."

Mas wasn't hesitant about taking the reins.
"Originally," says
Masvidal, "Salman and I had a lot more connections than
Jorge to the
Reagan Administration. Jorge was a nobody. But
he has a
single-purpose mind and somehow he grabbed the leadership
and
eventually he pushed Salman out and eventually eased me out,
too."

In retrospect, Masvidal says, he didn't realize the Reagan
Administration set up the Foundation not to specifically
advance the
Cuban cause but as part of its larger scheme. "Not
initially," he
says, "but after you've been burned two or three times by
the
machinations of the CIA and the U.S. Government, you get
skeptical." Jorge Mas was the manipulator. "It's
such a
dishonest effort," Masvidal says, "that I feel bad now that
I was used
by Jorge, that I was so dumb that I allowed myself to be
utilized. He's a hell of a natural leader and he
fooled me. The
same way that 10 million people will tell you that Castro
fooled them
when he said he wasn't a Communist."

Neither was the special structure of the new organization
Mas'
idea. He was steered to a Washington attorney who was
close to
the Administration. The late Barney Barnett had set up
the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the
highly
effective pro-Israel lobby. Barnett advised setting up
the
Foundation's PAC and its lobbying arm as separate
entities.
"The lobby arm was originally called the Cuban American
Public Affairs
Council," notes a former Foundation member. "They changed
the name to
the Cuban American Foundation to deceive the
contributors.
Donations to the Cuban American National Foundation are
tax-deductible,
but not those to its lobby, the Cuban American
Foundation. A lot
of money floats around."

When the Foundation was organized, Jorge Mas relied on its
first
executive director, Frank Calzon, to make political contacts
and show
him around Washington. Long active in the human rights
movement
and highly respected on the Hill, Calzon built the
Foundation's initial
reputation as a legitimate base for source material on the
Cuban
issue. But as Mas began to steer the organization
closer to the
Administration, Calzon didn't like what he saw coming.
Calzon
soon found himself participating in weekly intelligence
briefings that
were held in the White House complex, where intelligence
agents from a
number of services would report the latest developments in
Latin
American hot spots. When Calzon resigned, Mas started
a vicious
whispering campaign about his personal life. Calzon
wrote a
column for The Miami Herald warning the Cuban community to
beware the
"new caudillos" who would lead them to harm's way.

There were also a series of personnel movements between the
Foundation
and the intelligence community, the most notable being the
appointment
of José Sorzano, president of the Foundation, to the
National
Security Council. On his departure, Mas gave him a
$10,000 bonus.

"Between 1981 and 1985," recalls Raul Masvidal, "I was very
involved in
the Foundation while Jorge started getting closer and closer
to the
White House and the Washington intelligence community.
There is
no question that he built some kind of personal trail where
all kinds
of orders were brought down from Washington. Jorge
didn't trust
me enough to involve me, he was a good operator, but he was
obviously
getting marching orders from the White House or the CIA or
somewhere."

*

That "somewhere" is the key to Jorge Mas' connections.
In January
1983, President Reagan signed National Security Decision
Directive No.
77, a secret executive order that permitted the National
Security
Council to coordinate inter-agency efforts for something
called
"Project Democracy." In February 1987, Joel Brinkley,
a reporter
for The New York Times, uncovered the significance of that
order:
"The Reagan Administration's clandestine dealings with Iran
and the
Nicaraguan rebels grew out of a well-concealed program
established in
the White House at least four years ago to conduct covert
foreign
policy initiatives.... The program, Project Democracy,
began as
the secret side of an otherwise open, well-publicized
initiative that
started life under the same name. Project Democracy's
covert side
was intended to carry out foreign policy tasks that other
Government
agencies were unable or unwilling to pursue...."

The public arm of Project Democracy evolved into the
National Endowment
for Democracy, a conduit of funds to the Cuban American
National
Foundation and other groups supportive of Administration
policy.
The N.E.D. was supervised by the NSC's Walter Raymond Jr., a
propaganda
expert and senior officer detailed from the CIA's
Directorate of
Operations. Lt. Col. Oliver North was an obscure
National
Security Council aide when he was appointed to head the
secret arm of
Project Democracy. Under him, it grew into a parallel
foreign
policy apparatus and pulled the NSC into the business of
running secret
operations out of the White House, culminating in the sale
of arms to
Iran, the diversion of profits and the illegal supply of
arms to the
Nicaraguan rebels.

Jorge Mas was up to his bushy eyebrows in both aspects of
Project
Democracy. Aside from his involvement with N.E.D.
funding, Mas
joined the national board of an offspring of Project
Democracy called
PRODEMCA, which backed U.S. military assistance to the
Nicaraguan
Contras. It worked in conjunction with a secret
fund-raising
program pulled together by one of Reagan's bosom buddies,
U.S.
Information Agency director Charles Wick. (The Wicks
were old
California friends, one of the few couples who regularly
dined
privately with Nancy and Ron.) In a statement issued
to The New
York Times in 1987, Wick denied any connection to Project
Democracy: "I did not, and I was never asked to raise
money for
Project Democracy."

He was kidding. In 1983, in a confidential "talking
points" memo
for a meeting of wealthy businessmen, President Reagan
noted:
"Charlie Wick has taken the lead in Project
Democracy.... I asked
Charlie to pull this group together -- to form a nucleus of
support in
the private sector for programs critical to our efforts
overseas.
I know Charlie can do this."

Charlie did it. He got $400,000 out of the
group. Working
with Wick, Jorge Mas became one of his closest friends and
supporters. And -- what are friends for? -- he even
did Wick a
few favors. In 1983, Wick was invited as a guest to
the board
meeting of the Cuban American National Foundation and spend
a few days
at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Shortly
afterwards, it was
revealed that Wick had been regularly and secretly taping
his telephone
conversations, including those with top members of the
Administration. It was stupid and indiscreet but not
against
Federal law to do so in Washington, but it became known that
Wick had
also taped conversations while he was at the Breakers.
(In fact,
he recorded a conversation with Reagan's then-chief of
staff, James
Baker, about Project Democracy.) In Florida, it is a
felony crime
to tape telephone conversations without two-party consent or
a court
order. That put Republican Palm Beach State Attorney
David
Bludworth in a bind. Wick had obviously committed a
felony, but
Bludworth said he would have to research the law before he
made a
decision about indicting Wick. The problem for
Bludworth was that
the law was so damn clear and, worse, Wick had confessed he
did it and
turned the tapes over to a Senate committee.

It was obviously time for Jorge Mas and his wealthy friends
of the
Cuban American National Foundation to assess the
situation. It so
happened that Bludworth was running for re- election in 1984
and was
falling behind in his fund raising. Weeks went
by while
Bludworth pondered his decision. After the heat of the
incident
subsided, Bludworth announced he decided not to indict
Wick.
Taking it upon himself to judicially dynamite the
ignorance-of- the-law
concept, Palm Beach's chief criminal prosecutor
explained: "Wick
was not aware of our statutes."

That fall, Bludworth's campaign contribution reports listed
a number of
hefty donations from Cuban Americans, as well as
contributions from
lawyers Charles Barnett and his father, Barney. Sure,
the same
Barney Barnett who had helped legally structure the Cuban
American
National Foundation.

*

Doing favors for friends of men at the top often produces
reciprocation. But to be guaranteed clout at the top
when you
need it, you have to be owed more than a few favors.
Ron Reagan
and George Bush owe Jorge Mas a lot.

Early this summer, Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence
Walsh
obtained a criminal indictment against former Defense
Secretary Caspar
Weinberger. The indictment charges Weinberger with
being involved
in and then covering up the illegal trade of arms for
hostages with
Iran and shipments of arms to the Contras. Woven
throughout the
30-page indictment is the name of President George
Bush. At the
time, Bush was Vice President and a chief of the Crisis
Management Team
of the National Security Council. Although he has
never been
called to testify under oath, Bush has repeatedly denied any
knowledge
of illegal arms sales or shipments. He claims he was
"out of the
loop."

On October 11, 1986 there was a little-noticed story at the
bottom of
page one of The Miami Herald. It was written by
Washington bureau
staffer Alfonso Chardy:

The National Security Council and the Office of Vice
President George
Bush shared responsibilities in setting up the elaborate
supply system
that came to light with the downing of an American-manned
aircraft in
Nicaragua last week, knowledgeable administration officials
said
Saturday.

The administration officials said that while the NSC
recruited
technical and logistical personnel retired from the CIA or
Army Special
Forces in establishing the network, the vice president's
staff
concentrated on organizing Cuban exiles in Miami.

Spokesmen for the White House and the vice president's
office on
Saturday repeated denials that the U.S. government was
involved in any
way in efforts to provide military supplies to the
anti-Sandinista
rebels.

Now, six years later, no knowledgeable Washington insider
doubts the
accuracy of Chardy's story, but no special prosecutor has
yet produced
one live witness who would swear in court that both Reagan
and Bush
knew and were directly involved in the illegal Contra supply
network. Tom Polgar, a staff member on the
congressional
committees that investigated the operation, characterizes
Bush's
protestations of ignorance as "total nonsense." Yet,
until
someone comes forward who worked with Bush or his aides on
the inside
and knows that the then-Vice President had knowledge of the
actual arms
supply operation, Bush can't be charged with a crime.

One of the first cracks of light to hit that operation came
with the
downing of the American-manned aircraft mentioned in
Chardy's Herald
story. The only surviving crewman, Eugene Hasenfus,
was captured
and paraded before reporters in Managua. Hasenfus said
that a
Cuban-American veteran of the Bay of Pigs named "Max Gomez"
helped
coordinate the aerial supply network from an airbase at
Ilopango in El
Salvador. According to Hasenfus, Gomez told his
associates at
Ilopango that he reported to Vice President George Bush, a
member of
the National Security Council, about his activities.
It was
Bush's adviser on the NSC, Donald Gregg, who helped arrange
the private
Contra network.

When reporters caught up to Bush on a campaign swing through
North
Carolina, he acknowledged that he had met Gomez three times
and
described him as "a patriot," but Bush refused to answer
questions
about his knowledge of the supply network.

It wasn't long before it became known that the man Hasenfus
had known
as "Max Gomez" was really Felix Rodriquez, the legendary CIA
agent and
close pal of Jorge Mas. (Rodriguez would later claim
he adopted
the moniker of "Max Gomez," a hero of Cuba's war of
independence, when
he arrived in El Salvador, but, oddly enough, "Max Gomez"
was also
listed in the address book confiscated by Venezuelan police
from
Orlando Bosch.) Rodriquez had worked with Bush's
adviser Donald
Gregg, also a CIA veteran, in Vietnam. When that
became known,
Gregg refused any comment, but Marlin Fitzwater, a spokesman
for Bush,
said, "There is no one on the vice president's staff who is
directing
or coordinating an operation in Central America.
Allegations to
that effect are simply not true."

Later, Rodrigues issued a statement, distributed by Bush's
office, that
he was only "marginally involved" in the effort to aid the
Contras, and
ex-CIA boss Bush said he did not know that ex-CIA agent
Rodriguez was
involved at all with the Contras, although his staff had
been in
contact with him at least a dozen times. Telephone
records from
the house that Rodriguez used in El Salvador revealed he had
also been
in touch with Lt. Col. Oliver North at the White House.

Downed crewman Hasenfus had also mentioned that there was
another Cuban
exile named "Ramón Medina" who worked closely with "Max
Gomez." Ramón Medina, also a phony name, turned out to
be
another old buddy of Jorge Mas, Luis Posada. Having
somehow
acquired about $28,600 to bribe his way out of that
Venezuelan jail
where he had been held with Orlando Bosch for bombing the
Cubana
airplane, Posada had been stashed away at various South
American
locations and supported by Miami exile friends until he
somehow found a
job with his old CIA associate Rodriguez. It's a small
world.

There's an interesting spin that was later put on all this
by Rodriguez
himself when he published his "autobiography," Shadow
Warrior. Rodriguez says that after he retired
from the CIA
in 1976 (having been given the Agency's highest honor, the
Intelligence
Star for Valor, mainly for having helped capture and
eliminate Che
Guevara), he was sitting around getting angry watching
Castro "aiding
and abetting antidemocratic insurgencies" in Latin
America. So he
began creating his own "counterinsurgency plan," featuring
the liberal
use of bombers and helicopter gunships and, as he put it,
"the best
elements of what I learned in Vietnam." Then, through
his
contacts in the U.S. government, he tried to sell himself
and his plan
to certain Latin American countries. He admits he was
helped by
his old Vietnam boss, Donald Gregg, and was introduced to
Ollie North,
who helped him make contact with the Salvadoran government
to work as a
"consultant." His point is that he never got orders
from Bush
adviser Gregg, he just kept Gregg advised. ("When I told Don
Gregg of
the progress I was making, he was delighted.") Truth
is hard to
come by amid all the book's mirror images, but Rodriguez
does neglect
to mention that when Hasenfus' plane went down, Vice
President Bush's
office was one of the first in Washington to learn of the
crash.
It received a call from Felix Rodriguez.

*

It is important now that the nature of Jorge Mas'
relationships with
Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada appear
inconsequential. In fact,
there was an intensive exchange of information about what
was happening
at the Ilopango arms supply operation. Records
indicate, for
instance, that Posada made a number of calls from his San
Salvador
safe-house telephone to Miami. In addition to calling
his wife,
Posada was in touch with Dr. Alberto Hernandez, one of the
members of
the Cuban American National Foundation closest to Mas.

The connection between Rodriguez and Mas is also very
tight. In
his book, Rodriguez mentions Mas only twice, calls him a
"longtime
friend" from whom he refused the offer of a lawyer at his
congressional
hearing. That only hints at the nature of their
alliance. A
freelance pilot who had also worked out of Ilopango recently
ran into
Rodriguez at the Solder of Fortune convention in
Orlando. That's
sponsored by Soldier of Fortune Magazine, the bible of
gung-ho
mercenaries published by ex-Army Captain Bob Brown, a
veteran of the
intelligence community. In the pilot's conversation
with
Rodriguez, Jorge Mas' name came up. Rodriguez
mentioned that TV's
60 Minutes was working on a feature about Mas. "Felix
looked at
his watch," the pilot recalls, "and said, 'In fact, Jorge is
probably
doing the interview right now." Mas is extremely
security
conscious, few people know his movements in advance.
That
Rodriguez should know what Mas was doing at a particular
minute on a
particular day says something about their relationship.

"I saw Felix come into our offices in Miami many times,"
says a former
business associate of Mas. "I thought he was weird, with his
black
gloves and his briefcase, but whenever anyone asked Mas who
he was, Mas
would say, 'Oh, that's the guy who killed Che Guevara.'"

From the moment it began its grand crusade to turn back the
spreading
plague of Communism in Latin America, the Reagan
Administration
considered the Cuban American National Foundation one of the
major
weapons in its Project Democracy arsenal. "The
Foundation became
very much involved in the Contra effort," remembers former
founding
director Raul Masvidal, who also recalled the weekly inside
briefings. "There was no question there was some
kind of
intelligence link. That's when Mas developed the
theme, 'The road
to Havana goes through Managua.' He kept repeating it
until we
actually started to believe that in order to overthrow
Castro we had to
first join forces with the Contras."
Mas himself began taking frequent trips to Ilopango.
He didn't
keep it a secret within his circle. An associate who
still works
with him has direct knowledge: "I heard a conversation
about arms
dealing with Salvador for weapons to be transferred to
Ilopango and
then to the Contras. I witnessed that."

Not all the Foundation members were in favor of the
involvement,
Masvidal among them. "I remember Jorge clearly trying
to convince
me when I started protesting that we were getting involved
too much in
issues that were not related to Cuba and that I felt we were
being
used. And when I voiced that, Jorge immediately called
me a
traitor, called me every name in the book. When I took
opposition
to him, Jorge felt I was betraying the whole effort.
But there
was no question that Jorge was making promises to
Washington.
'Oh, you want this? I'll deliver it. You want
that?
I'll deliver it.' It was part of the CIA's way of
masking or
getting around the law and Jorge and the Foundation were a
part of it."

One of the mysteries that congressional investigators were
not able to
solve was the presence of Luis Posada with Felix Rodrigues
in
Ilopango. How did the international fugitive get
there? Was
he sprung from his Venezuelan prison specifically to get
involved in
the illegal Contra arms network? Investigators
couldn't ask
Posada because as soon as his name emerged he had
disappeared.
(It was later learned that he was running a clandestine
security force
for Guatemala president Vincio Cerezo, but after a bloody
attempt on
his life, he fled again into hiding, where he still is.)

Rodriguez danced around the questions with
investigators. In his
book, he acknowledges knowing about Posada's jail break and
giving him
a job at Ilopango after being "contacted by an individual
who explained
Posada's predicament." He says he told neither his
resupply crews
nor Oliver North the real name of "Ramón Medina." And,
he
pointedly notes, "I certainly didn't mention anything to
[George Bush's
aide] Don Gregg."

Jorge Mas has publicly denied he was involved in either
helping Posada
escape or getting him the job at Ilopango. Among his
Foundation
friends, however, he has not been reticent. More than
one past
member as well as a present associate claim Mas talked about
both
playing a role in raising the money to finance Posada's
escape and in
helping the fugitive get his job with the illegal supply
network.

A former vice president of the Foundation, Jose Luis
Rodriguez, is more
specific. He admits he was both solicited for and
contributed to
the fund to provide Posada the money to bribe his way out of
the
Venezuelan jail. The matter, he says, was first
brought up at the
same board meeting at the Breakers Hotel where USIA boss
Charles Wick
was a guest. Mas immediately ruled that it was an
"inappropriate"
time to discuss it. Subsequently, it was done more
privately. As a reminder of his contribution,
Rodriguez has a
painting which Posada did while in jail. It's of a
beautiful
palomino horse running free.

(José Rodriguez, by the way, claims his split with the
Foundation came after Mas' assertion of power forced out
respected
executive director, Frank Calzon. He said he was asked
to help
spread personal rumors about Calzon, and that disgusted
him.
Rodriguez says resigning was considered an act of disloyalty
and the
inside clique of directors, with whom he was in on a number
of major
business ventures, began short-changing him on the
deals. He
claims Mas uses his Foundation connections for personal
financial
aggrandizement, parlaying business deals with his inside
clique into
millions of dollars. A private investigation has
linked Mas to
more than 36 different corporations.)

*

Although Jorge Mas' extremely close relationship with both
Felix
Rodriguez and Luis Posada indicates his intimate knowledge
of the
illegal Contra arms supply network and its White House
overseers, the
hardest evidence that he was directly involved in it comes
straight
from the guy who held the strings, Ollie North. In his
notebooks,
North jotted cryptic notes revealing Jorge Mas' role in
Project
Democracy. Among them are indications that Mas served
as an
intermediary to the leaders of certain Latin American
countries to
pressure them to support the project.

Some entries were very specific: On January 28, 1985,
North
wrote: "Felix Rodriquez – Expedite 50K for I.R." Below
it is the
notation, "Jorge Mas". Another entry noted, "Mtg.
w/Felix
Rodriguez -- Call Jorge Mas." Included in North's
notes were five
different telephone numbers for Mas, including his private
line at home.

That direct operational contact with the man supervising the
Administration's illegal arms supply system, along with the
working
relationship with his close buddies on the line at Ilopango,
gives Mas
the knowledge that provides him his own special leverage
with the Bush
Administration.

"Without a doubt," says former associate Raul
Masvidal. He
repeats it. "Without a doubt. No question that
Jorge has
been in meetings with Bush at the White House and with
Bush's people
when Bush was Vice President. I know because I was
around him at
the time and I heard him talk about it."

Perhaps the most insightful comment comes from Luis Posada,
of all
people. Posada had a secret meeting with Herald
reporter
Christopher Marquis after he was exposed and fled the Contra
operation. Posada is tired and maimed from the attack
on him in
Guatemala and he's trying to refurbish his image so he can
return to
his wife and family in Miami. He gave Marquis a
lengthy
interview. He had been in hiding for a while and
probably didn't
realize he was contradicting his old friends, Rodriguez and
Mas.
Posada said Donald Gregg, national security adviser to Vice
President
George Bush, took a direct interest in the Contra supply
project and
helped with staffing problems. When Marquis pointed
out that both
Bush and Reagan had denied any involvement in the affair,
Posada, the
battle-scarred CIA veteran, said: "Listen to me.
The CIA
had bases in Aguacate [Honduras] and at Ilopango. We
saw them
every day. Now, are you telling me that the President
of the
United States didn't know about this?"

*

The bottom line is this: Jorge Mas has used the
leverage his
involvement and knowledge has given him to maintain a
strangle hold on
United States foreign policy in Latin America and
Cuba. Right
now, when world political cataclysms demand a complete
reassessment of
the United States' historically unproductive relationship
with Cuba --
a relationship that has provided Fidel Castro with the
Looming Boogie
Man threat he has used to rally internal support for 33
years -- Jorge
Mas has forced the issues to be defined in his terms,
dictated the
boundaries of the conflicts and manipulated their resolution
to meet
his personal political agenda. A bill that is now
passing through
Congress is a dramatic example of Mas' power to call the
shots at every
level of the U.S. government.

Magically entitled "The Cuban Democracy Act of 1992," the
House bill
was introduced by a liberal New Jersey Democrat, Robert
Torricelli, for
whom re-districting now means counting on the votes and
money of North
Jersey's Cuban exile community. Torricelli's bill
would tighten
the embargo that the U.S. declared against Cuba 29 years
ago. Its
features include prohibiting trade with Cuba by the
subsidiaries of
American corporations based abroad; prohibiting U.S. firms
from taking
tax deductions for expenses related to its subsidiary trade
with Cuba;
and restricting foreign ships that trade at Cuban ports from
visiting
U.S. ports.

The bill is Torricelli's baby but Jorge Mas is its
Godfather. It
was seeded in Torricelli a year ago when he cruised
Florida's Biscayne
Bay aboard a luxury yacht with a dozen of Mas' wealthy exile
friends. Shortly after taking over the Western
Hemisphere
subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
Torricelli
declared he would focus on Castro. His second edict,
according to
a former aide, was: "Whatever the Foundation wants, the
Foundation
gets." When Mas was invited to testify before
the
subcommittee last year and he refused to sit on the same
panel with
more liberal Cuban exiles, Torricelli ordered a second panel
created
for Mas -- an unprecedented perk for a Congressional
witness. But
Mas never forgets a friend. By late last spring,
he and his
pals had already kicked in more than $10,000 to Torricelli's
campaign
coffers.

The Torricelli bill was a near reductio ad absurdum of the
United
State's historic big- stick-no-carrots economic policy
towards
Cuba. Former diplomat Wayne Smith viewed the
Torricelli bill as
more than a heavier stick, he saw it as "a blunderbuss aimed
squarely
at our own feet." For some, it made little moral sense
to inflict
further suffering on the Cuban people in an attempt to
topple a tyrant,
especially when we were courting despots in North Korea and
Vietnam and
opening Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets off Tiananmen Square.
However, the bill appeared to have little chance of getting
endorsed by
the Bush Administration. The State Department was
strongly
against it. "It's self-destructive," said a Cuban desk
officer. "The ban on subsidiary trade provokes our
allies."

And it did. The British Foreign Trade Secretary
bitingly noted,
"It is for the British government, not the U.S. Congress, to
determine
the U.K.'s policy on trade with Cuba." Canada also
voiced its
objection. The European Community sent a démarche announcing
that the EC would not accept "the extraterritorial extension
of U.S.
jurisdiction," declared the bill in conflict with
international law and
said its economic disincentives would be "Draconian."
No way that
Bush could back a bill that produced such hostile reaction
from both
within his own Administration and among necessary allies.

But Jorge Mas hadn't yet unsheathed his political
muscle. While
everyone else was viewing the bill as a foreign policy
issue, Mas also
saw it as an opportunity to advance his personal
domestic
political agenda. After all, there just might be
a new
President next year and it was never too early to work both
sides of
the street -- especially when you knew you already had one
side in your
pocket.

The debates on the Torricelli bill in various committee and
subcommittee hearings have produced, and will continue to
produce,
thousands of inches of newspaper stories, essays and
opposing columns
as it moves through the legislative process. But the
biggest
headlines about it have already been printed.

Last April, Bill Clinton pulled a surprise raid on the
hottest
political turf in the country for Reagan-Bush, Miami's
Little
Havana. Blasted the Herald's front page
headline: CLINTON
BACKS TORRICELLI BILL: 'I LIKE IT,' HE TELLS CUBAN
EXILES. That
afternoon, at a fundraiser at Victor's Café, he pulled in
$125,000. Earlier in the day, at a private party heavy
with
Hispanic donors in the Colonnade Hotel, he picked up another
$150,000. A month later, on Cuban Independence Day, he
returned
and was handed $100,000 by four Cuban American businessmen.

After that, President Bush was a patsy for Mas. Having
previously
said he had "problems" with the Torricelli bill, Bush
grabbed back the
headlines with a declaration that would, by Executive Order,
implement
a new policy that was sneakingly similar to a provision in
the
bill. The order would restrict further shipping to
Cuba by
prohibiting entry into U.S. ports by vessels that engage in
trade with
Cuba.

Bush's State Department, which had been vehemently against
trade
restrictions, kept diplomatically silent. Off the
record, one
official admitted to a Herald reporter, "We're bending over
on this and
taking it."

Columnist Georgie Anne Geyer also spoke with insiders at
State:
"State Department officials admit that Mr. Mas'
Foundation...has been
responsible for the fact that the United States has
basically
formulated no policy of its own toward Cuba because of fear
of the
Foundation's tactics.... To say that U.S. policy on
Cuba at this
crucial moment -- when the next and defining stage of Cuban
history is
being formed -- is thus being run by a bunch of nuts and
ambitious
egomaniacs is not too far from the truth."

Sticks and stones may break his bones, but Georgie Anne
Geyers' words
couldn't wipe the smile off Jorge Mas' face. Didn't
she realize
what it was really all about? Didn't she realize the
whole
Torricelli bill controversy, the maneuvering to get Bill
Clinton to
back it, the display of muscle that forced President Bush to
do a
perfect backflip -- all of it was a message to Fidel
Castro. It
was to show him, after all these years, who still calls the
shots here
in Cuba America. Jorge Mas has taught that lesson more
than one
time.

*

Jorge Mas smiles. I have cornered him again, this time
in the
huge ballroom at the Radisson Mart Hotel near the Miami
airport.
He has just pulled off a beautiful stunt. He has
gotten David
Lawrence, the publisher of The Miami Herald, to shake hands
with him
immediately after he sucker-punched him. Poor Lawrence
was too
stunned to realize what was happening, and too much of a
gentleman to
tell Mas to go screw himself. Besides, for the sake of
his
newspaper, Lawrence was just happy the war was over and the
hatchet had
been buried -- even if it was in his own head.

"Now that you've made a peace agreement," I asked Mas, "Do
you think David Lawrence understands you?"

Mas had to smile. He knew what I meant. "No," he
said,
quickly hiding his grin and diverting his answer to a brief
speech
about how his battle with the Herald would now result in it
being more
sensitive to the interests of the Cuban-American
community. Mas
knew that's not what my question was about. I wanted
to know
whether he thought that Lawrence, a big, bespectacled,
preppy-type
fellow with a pleasant smile and likely a good grasp of the
Marquis of
Queensberry rules, realized he had been beaten and bloodied
by a
battling bantam who knew only fingers-in-the-eyes,
knees-to-the-balls
gutter brawling, a street tough he should have avoided in
the first
place. Of course, poor Dave still didn't realize
that. He
might not have shown up for this staged "peace" encounter if
he had.

The charity chiefs in the local Easter Seal Society had come
up with
the notion of having a fund-raising "Community Unity"
luncheon, which
wasn't a bad concept in itself. Miami is disparity
urbanized. But the plan to get Jorge Mas Canosa and
David
Lawrence Jr. to stand before a few hundred major players in
town, shake
hands and announce for the sake of community unity they
really loved
each other and wouldn't fight no more, well, that could have
used more
review.

Mas set Lawrence up good. On his way into the crowded
ballroom
Mas stopped and announced to reporters that the Cuban
American National
Foundation was calling off its campaign against The Miami
Herald and
its sister Spanish-language paper El Nuevo Herald.
"For the good
of the community," he said. So everyone thought that
the major
event, following a few brief fund-raising spiels for the
Easter Seal
Society, would come off as planned, with both Mas and
Lawrence saying
nice things about each other, gentlemanly refraining from
declarations
of victory, shaking hands and living happily ever
after. An
Easter Seals coup for community unity.

Mas was first. Later he would say he misunderstood the
format. He said he thought it was to be a mutual
"roast," a
humorous, verbal jabbing exhibition just for the
entertainment of the
crowd. Jab, hell, Mas started with kidney
punches. He said
Lawrence didn't realize what a major feud he was starting
when he
picked on the Cuban American community "Let's face it,
Dave," he
taunted, "you never expected it." He implied that
Lawrence was a
wimp, not enough of a man to put up a tough fight. He
ridiculed
the publisher's attempts during the dispute to deal directly
with
Miami's Cuban community. "And there you were, Dave, on
Cuban
television trying to speak Spanish and looking like a scared
deer
caught in a truck's headlights." He also noted that
Lawrence's
Spanish was so atrocious he might as well have used sign
language.

This was a peace meet? Lawrence appeared numb but
turned his
gentlemanly cheek. When his turn came, he acted as if
he hadn't
been sitting there when Mas was pummeling him. He
spoke only
about how the Easter Seal Society had once helped his son,
now a
lawyer, to overcome a childhood disability. Then, when
he was
finished, Mas rose again and, magnanimous now,
declared Lawrence
a worthy adversary whom he personally respected.
Lawrence
appeared dazed as Mas walked over, shook his hand for the
cameras and
formally announced the end of the Cuban American National
Foundation's
battle with The Herald. Then, like a light slap of his
glove and
simply as a final reminder of who still called the shots,
Mas added,
"For the time being." And as he raised his arms in
victory before
turning to leave, the cavernous ballroom seemed to fill with
the misty
echoes of a far away chant that came floating across the
waters of the
Florida straits....
"HoooorrrrHey!"